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WoW-Pro Dungeons Addon

Submitted by Silvann on Thu, 2010-11-11 03:01

Introduction

Hello all!

I am working on a new module for the WoW-Pro addon called WoW-Pro Dungeons, that should provide the framework for guides and information related to dungeons in World of Warcraft. Right now, the WoW-Pro Dungeons is still in its early alpha stage, but I decided to create this page to explain my own design ideas and to hear feedback from the community (especially those that are in the beta, since I'm not).

That way, if we decide to change something, I won't waste too much programming time.

Basic Idea

WoW-Pro Dungeons will make use of the WoW-Pro Guide frame, showing steps and information in a similar way, that happens now, with the WoW-Pro Leveling module. Because of this, only one module will be active at a given time, but there should be plenty of options for the player to switch between them, manually or automatically (more on that later).

But there are important differences between leveling and dungeon guides:

dungeon guides do not have a fixed format and some players may only be interested in specific information, like a list of quests for a given dungeon or its bosses fights, and not in full walkthrough guides;

leveling guides are much more popular, so I would not expect good quality walkthrough guides for all dungeons, at least not initially. Given that, it would be better if we provide ways to accept smaller contributions from the community.

Therefore, unlike WoW-Pro Leveling, WoW-Pro Dungeons should allow access to different types of guides, for each dungeon, from the more basic to the more lenghty. For another hand, the dungeon guides should follow, as much as possible, the format of the WoW-Pro Leveling guides, to not confuse guide writers and players.

Types of Dungeon Guides

The types of guides, for each dungeon, I'm thinking of are the following:

Location:

At least for some dungeons in Cataclysm, the player has to discover them before using the Dungeon Finder directly. The location "guide" can contain a single coordinate step to map (something that I could include as default) or be more complex, for dungeons that require a lot of running around (or flying) to get to the actual dungeon portal. The location "guide" could also be used by dead players unfamiliar with the dungeon, unsure on how to get back to the dungeon portal.

Quest list:

Showing the list of all quests that should be completed in the dungeon, marking which ones the player already has; has completed and turned in; have completed but not turned in; whether the quest is too high level; etc. All these will make use of the format defined by the WoW-Pro Leveling steps, like Accept/Turn-in, and also the mapping by TomTom, showing where to get and where to turn in each quest. It will also allow the use of class/level/etc flags.

EDIT: It seems quests are more easily picked up in cataclysm dungeons, so this guide type may be obsolete.

Boss guides:

Guides that explain boss/encounter fights. They are meant to be used in dungeons, so some restrictions on mapping will apply. It will also allow the use of class/role/etc flags. The idea is that the guide should be short enough to be read by a player just before fighting the boss, but this can be changed.

Walkthrough guides:

The pinnacle of dungeon guides, steps that form a complete walkthrough in the dungeon. The idea is that this type of guide should be used mainly (or completely) inside the dungeon, so some restrictions on mapping will apply. WoWPro already has several good of such guides:

Though probably some (the lower levels?) will need to be updated or re-written for Cataclysm.

Achievements guides:

Guides for completing achievements related to specific dungeons.

Once I get the addon in a more stable way, I'll provide at least one guide of each type, as an example, and also some instruction on writing dungeon guide for the addon. Again, the format should be quite similar to the Leveling guides, but not completely.

Planned features

Option to allow smart auto-load of dungeon guides, based on being in a dungeon, boss fight, etc.

A frame to allow guides to show images.

Allow sharing guide steps with party members (especially good for boss fights).

Preview of the Dungeon/Guide list frame

Dungeon names, levels and progress come from LFG tool.

The progress comes from the dungeon achievement, when possible it will show the number of missing/defeated bosses, to mark the dungeon as completed.

Level ranges can be by allowed or recommended levels.

Dungeon names will likely have colored text, like the LFG tool, but a different highlight than shown in the above image.

Feedback Questions

If you have any suggestion/info on the following topics, please post in this thread.

How much the Dungeons module should interact with Leveling Guides? For example, if you skip a quest in a Leveling guide, that is a pre-requisite to a Dungeon quest, would you want the Dungeon guide skip steps related to that skipped leveling quest?

Should this addon support guides for raids? If so, what would need to be changed (if any) in the layout discusses above?

How to deal with heroics? I think most, if not all, guides that works in the normal mode will work for the heroic versions of the dungeons. So, my idea is to just have a 'heroic'/'normal' tag, that guide writers can use, in specific guide steps. Then, those steps would only be shown if the player is in the heroic/normal version or if the player set an option for that. Or, I could include all the heroic versions in the dungeon list pictured above, with their own guide types icons.

Comments

Over the weekend, not realizing this thread was here, I wrote up a version of WoWPro_Instance that paralleled many of the ideas you put forth here. I even tried it on RagefireChasm, just to test it.

My version made some simple changes to the step processing:

Changed the Z tag so that +Orgrimmar would set the quest as being optional if you were not in Orgrimmar. This let me handle the three different lead-in quests [Enemies Below] presented by the leaders of the horde.

Changed the zone autocomplete logic so an N step could complete if the |Z| matched the current zone. I.e. "Ragefire Chasm". Might have ben=en better to add a new "D" step that would trigger when you went into an instance.

Added a "S" (Say) and "P" (Party) commands for giving information on the instance itself to other players

Added tag "ROLE" to skip the step if you do not have the "Leader" or "Tank" or "Assist" assignment

I also made some other random changes for fun, like auto-sharing quests when a new party member joins or trying to place "routes" to places on the maps so you if you fell down somewhere, you could have a chance to get to the right place.

I also considerd adding a command for doing SetRaidTarget() for NPC as they came in range. An invisible step.

My effort was a throw-away. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help your effort!

Yeah, as Jiyambi said, definately not a throw away! As I said in the PM, we can work together to merge what we have done. ;)

Some specific comments now:

1) There is already a LEADIN tag for quests, but you may have noticed it doesn't deal well with different "versions" of the same lead-in quests. It just auto-completes them if the player has the quests they led to. So we can use your zone-optional functionality along side that.

2) I made some changes on how the dungeons module register and parse the guide files, so this may not be necessary. Basically, depending on the type of the dungeon guide (as seen above), the zone is set as the name of the instance already, to avoid having to use, for example, |Z|Ragefire Chasm| in every step if the global zone is set as Orgrimmar. But we'll see that later.

3) Our idea to give information to other players is by right-clicking a specific step and choosing the 'share step to party' option. Is that what you had in mind or is it something else. At any rate, I havent coded any of that yet, so we can use yours.

4) My role tag sets a step as either 'healer', 'tank' or 'dps' and an overall option to display either all role steps or just the player's current role. But we can use what you have to automate this, like setting the option to show all steps as default for party leader/tank.

About the routes, our new replacement for TomTom (in dev) handles setting waypoints in dungeons (including different floors), allowing us to use the same mapping functions used by the leveling, but we can discuss differences in dungeons for mapping.

About the SetRaidTarget() for NPC as they came in range, this would be trickier to implement. AFAIK, there are 2 ways to identify dinamically nearby mobs: target and mouseover. Even if targetting mobs were not protected in combat, I don't think the players would enjoy us messing with their targetting automatically (though we add that functionality for the 'marked NPC' button - 'target' tag).

What we could do, though, is use what most other addons (like DBM, etc) use: mouseover mob info can trigger our codes. So what we could do is, before a pull, the tank passes the mouse over the mobs and our addon automatically set the corresponding marks, based on the guide step to CC, kill first, etc. But this should be done carefully, because lots of issues can arise from that, like targetting far away (with the same name) mobs, etc.

Hang on now, I don't think you should say your effort was a throw away. If anything it would be awesome if you wanted to share what you did with Silvann and you two can see if anything you did can/should be integrated into what he's working on. No need to waste it!

In the future though, do check with us before starting projects relating to the addon. Not because we are territorial about it, but because we like to avoid conflicts like this ;) There are alots of things still being worked on, and I honestly am going to have to take a major step back after I push through my dailies module, since school is really hard for me this term, so we'll need more developers!

Well, before Christmas, I had never even looked at an LUA file. I was just another WoW-Pro user.

My mother had asked my younger brother what to give me for Christmas, and he said, "World of Warcraft Programming, 2nd edition." ¿Guess what weighs 2,136 grams and was under the tree?

When I got stuck in Phoenix during the big East Coast snowstorm, I read the book, started paying attention to what !Swatter was reporting, and started to track down bugs. Nothing like bug-fixing to get you going on a new language and a huge application that uses it. Now I know more about TomTom , Astrolabe, and Auctioneer than I ever dreamed I would.

Then I decided to test my skills. In two days, I wrote a WoWPro_Instance addon and a sample guide for RageFire Chasm, played with it, patched some guides, and then officially joined the site here.

Comparing what I wrote against the WoWPro_Dungeons addon is grand: I rarely get a chance to do a programming bake-off with the same goal in mind.

The biggest single decision that makes the code in _Instance differerent from _Dungeons is re-using the Broker from WoWPro and the parser from WoWPro_Leveling. The most important idea I got after reviewing both sets of code is this—there is darn little you want to do in a Dungeon that you do not also want to do in a normal environment.

So, since I am a programmer and a manager in “real life,” I cannot resist making reccomendations:

Move the code in WoWPro_Leveling_Parser.lua to WoWPro_Parser.lua and adjust things to adapt. That way, we have only one syntax for guides and one place to fix bugs in it. Besides, it means that WoWPro_Recorder can be enhanced to record instances, professions, etc. as well!

Consider doing the same for WoWPro_Leveling_CurrentGuide and WoWPro_Instance_GuideList .

At this point, we could then decide which additional step-types to implement and suck the code from _Instance and _Dungeons.

Subtract out the code in _Dungeons that is now part of WoWPro and get it ready for Alpha!

Where are we now? The addons like _Leveling, _Dungeons, and others (_Dailies, _Professions, _Acheivements) manage lists of guides that have a common format, and are presented using a common UI, managed by WoWPro. Each has a notion of a current guide of that type, but the WoWPro addon manages which one is active and being shown to the user.

Oh no, I have done it again. There is a topic on github by the name of General Modularlizing Discussion that seems to be strongly aligned with this list, but more ambitious. At least now I am learning where to look.

Anyway, I do have the time to do this gradually (1 hour per weekday, 1–4 hours per day on the weekend). So feed me tasks and I will let you know how long it will take, and go off and do it.

Hahaha, thanks for this Ludovicus! I really appreciate insight from more experienced programmers. To tell you the truth, I'd never programmed before outside of some simple MATLAB scripting before I picked up WoW Programming (first edition, dang it, cause it was cheaper!) and started last year on this addon.

I'm now in school for a CS degree and slowly learning (I'm at the Frosh/Sophmore level atm), and I'm constantly seeing things I should have done differently as we go! So stuff like this is extremely useful.

We do tend to so most of our "developer" conversation on github, whereas guide file stuff often happens here. It's a little frustrating to have things split in that way, but the bug reporting system on github is really nice compared to anything we could set up here, so I think it's worth it.

Check out the update that I just pushed - it actually already has some of the changes you've been talking about, minus the parser changes. And, while I was updating things and making my dailies module, I reallized a lot of the parser stuff *could* be put into the broker... but... I want to make sure I preserve a lot of freedom in the modules to do what people want. Still, moving as many things as possible into the broker from the parser could be a goal for the future. There are several things that are really universal that I could move there (a "reset guide" function, a handler for the checkboxes, etc).

Anyway, I'm really excited to have another person interested in working on the addon, especially someone with "RL" experience! :)

In terms of handing out tasks... usually if people are interested in doing something they just look over the bug, feature/requests, and modules on the github site and pick one that looks interesting, then let me know they are going to work on it by leaving a comment there.

I know I'm coming in late having just stumbled on this, but I love this idea. As dps you can sort of go into a new dungeon or raid blind and follow the basic rules (don't stand in front of the boss, stay out of the fire/etc.) but some fights have "gotcha"s that go above and beyond this or other specifics to watch. For example in the Stonecore on Azil, as a dps I would want to see
-"interrupt Force Grip"
-"avoid boulders"
-"boss will put gravity wells on players, try to stand between boss and adds so when wells land, adds have to walk through wells to get to you"

As a tank in a raid, I am always having to look up the number of stacks to taunt or if there is shared damage. DBM does tell you the number of stacks but it really only warns you it has become a problem because you haven't taunted yet. For example on Toravon in VoA I would want to see
-"first taunt on 4 stacks, then again whenever debuff wears off"

On a shared damage boss I would just want it to say so.

As a tank in a heroic, I would want to know if there are adds coming, how many, when, and if they should/can be ignored (thinking of untargetable adds on Devourer of Souls here).

As a tank and a healer, it would be useful to know what kind of big damage abilities the boss has, kind of like the abilities list on boss pages at WoW Wiki. Someone who has done more healing would be better to ask on this one though since I have very limited healing experience.

As tank and melee dps sometimes you have to run out of melee range of a boss and it would be helpful to know that too.

Perhaps if you could have a window with rdps, mdps, tank, and heal tabs that we could flip through if we happened to just be standing around waiting for people, but have a selectable default role appear in combat in case we have to run in quickly.

For trash cc and kill order suggestions would be welcome.

I know a lot of people get cranky about being "spoon fed" information but I don't see how it is any different from having someone stop and explain things to you, and if that someone isn't in the mood because it is their 1000th time pugging the dungeon then an addon like this would help everyone get through fights more smoothly.

P.S. for quests I think the ones that are part of a chain that you haven't done are worth mentioning.

Sorry, I missed this post before. Thanks for your suggestions! About the tabs to show specific notes for each role, I'm implementing something more simple: a toggeable filter, that shows notes either only for the player;s current role (I can get that info) or all the notes (for all roles). But I could change that later. Soon I'll have an alpha version released so people can try it out, as well as pages for each dungeon to get feedbacks!

Thanks for all your feedback, guys! From what I can gather, an addon for Dungeons guides is wanted, but perhaps the format can still be improved. But we need a working version of the addon so people an test it out!

So, once I have a working alpha version (with some basic functionality and some example guides), I'll post about it in this thread, asking for testers! It should take still around 2 weeks. Meanwhile, I may post some questions up there, so people in the Cataclysm beta can help me answer them.

I may offer a little different view than others. I can understand where everyone is coming from but have a rather odd perspective on it all.

I have played almost all of my time in WoW solo. I enjoy my guild mates and the social side of the game, but don't get to group up often.

I have small children, and always feel guilty leaving a group in the lurch so I could run and change a diaper or read a story. Unfortunately, kids don't respect me scheduling when they wake up from their naps. lol! I don't feel a group should waste their time waiting for me to help my kids with their homework. One of the things that drew me to WoW is the fact that I can walk away from it at the drop of a hat.

I have experienced very little of the dungeons in the game, except the ones that were low enough level to solo through when I hit 80. (Which I always read up on here first. lol)

I hope to change this, as my kids are older now, but most people expect a lot of knowledge from someone with 80's. This is understandable, but kind of embarrassing sometimes.

If I plan on doing a dungeon, I of course read up on it before hand, but sometimes you get that random invite, and don't have time to read the full paper guide. In a lot situations, alt-tabbing in and out kind of ruins the flow and story of the game. I want to experience that game play, not just go through it, so having tips right in front of me would be a vast improvement for someone like me.

I would love a simple, easy to follow addon that I could use both when I group for dungeons and when I go back to solo them later. Either way, I like to experience as much content as possible, and anything that helps me to do that in the limited time I have is welcome and appreciated.

Obviously, I have very little knowledge of the specifics of such an addon, so don't have much input there, but I think that the community here could make this a helpful and well used addon.

I also have a horrible memory, so having tips in game would be extremely helpful, even when I'm more familiar with it.

I know that I am in the minority in this instance, but wanted to add how an experienced player, but dungeon newb looks at the idea. They can be intimidating, and I hate to walk in to something without some useful knowledge of what I'm doing. The other side is that since I have very little knowledge of the subject, it's difficult for me to offer any good feedback on mechanics, etc.

I hope that this chunk of text manages to convey how I play and how I feel, as I am, of course, in a rush. I have nothing but the utmost respect for the players that have amazing knowledge of any part of this game. Especially when they share it with me! lolol!

I love reading all of your insightful and informative comments and have learned a lot just from them. Thank you all. One of my favorite things about the WoW-Pro community is the communication between all the players and the desire to improve everyone's experience, in and out of the game.

I am right there with you. I do the same thing and it wasn't until I found a family oriented guild with people in the same boat did I start to do dungeons at the level they were supposed to be done at.

Being an old(er) gamer the thing about running dungeons that most irks me is having some jumped up 13yr old telling me that because he raids and has all the best gear (95% of the time on a different toon!) he is a better player and knows what he's doing.
Congratulation buddy, you have plenty of free time! See how you get on when you've got your own house, 2 children, run your own business, and have a wife that works full time too.

Btw I've been gaming since "computer" games came on cassette tapes!

Fortunatly for me the above doesn't happen much, as I don't logon til they're all tucked up in bed. It's currently 1:15am here, and I'm about to login and play til....urm....silly o clock in the morning (yes I'm an Insomniac)

Anyway back on topic....I'd say this is a fantastic idea, even in the same/similar format to the leveling guides. The annoucing notes to party would be awesome as mentioned, and the trash/boss notes just as good. As I've just said my normal play times are not great for getting good groups together most of the time, so something like this would be great.

As mentioned I think most quests for dungeons have now moved to the dungeon enterance, I'll check this later, as I have a good memory for all the quest for Deadmines, and I'm going there for a mining monkey!

Silvann, if you need any recorded guides, let me know. Weird thing is I thought how great something like this would be a couple of days ago, and recorded a quick blast through The Stockades. If you want I'll PM you the code, although I haven't yet checked it out. I'll record my trip through Deadmines later too.

Yes! Please, send or post in this thread your recorded dugeons runs! I haven't actually used the Recorder and I'm still deciding how much of the Dungeons module parser will be the same as the Leveling parser, but having recorded guides as examples will be good Thanks!

Right now, the recorder pretty much only records quests. In the future I want to add some more abilities to it. I was workig on that this weekend but I'm stuck on some issues with the Ace Dialog frames :( then I got distracted by homework.

Thanks for the feedback, Bits! I don't think you're as much in the minority as you believe you are - I have gotten a lot of feedback on this site from people in special situations such as yours. These are guides, remember. Guides aren't necessarily for the uber players. A lot of times, guides are most used by casual players curious to try something new. It's important for me to get feedback from these peeps - once you are inside, it's hard to remember what it looks like from the outside!

In general, (and personal opinion here) I'm not sure that the wow-pro guide is the right tool for a dungeon guide outside of directions and quest completion, and that really depends on the changes from cataclysm.

For bosses, there's not a lot of room to really cover bosses quickly with just a note, and you can't really split up the comments for all the mechanics that make a boss special.

That's why one reads or watches a guide showing the mechanics, and if they need an addon, they use something like Deadly Boss Mods to announce mechanics.

That said, class specific tips would admittedly be awesome, but I'm not sure that I can personally justify grabbing an addon just for those (although I know plenty of people would).

Rather than bosses though, trash mobs might be more useful to focus on since DBM can handle bosses and they aren't often covered by stuff like DBM (outside of those with really pesky mechanics)... but the guide format also fails here because you can't really cycle between tips/guide on mobs for packs with say 3-6 different types of mobs.

It's just not handy.

Instead the better option is to probably have notes available in tool tip format (such as those by the Mob Notes addon, for example). New notes just by mousing over different mobs, each detailing a quick synopsis of what to expect so you don't have to refer to 'paper' guide.

Boss tips could actually also be handled through tool tip format, honestly, although I don't think it's possible to make them class/talent specific, just general catch-all notes (so here is one part where guide addon format might be better maybe).

Quest gathering could be useful in the cases where quests aren't all available at the entrance, but as was pointed out...are there any still after cata? I don't know how that's changing, so I can't really comment. But I did love that a lot of the old guides here in this site started with a quest gathering section, and seeing that in addon format would definitely be useful if they're spread out for some instances. The question is whether they are.

Also, as with a lot of quests getting put at the start of an instance, I believe that cata is revamping instances so they're more linear/navigable. I don't know if that's the case for all, or just a select few like Sunken Temple. But if they're doing it globally, it's not quite as easy to get lost going from start of instance to last boss, losing some of the worth in using the guide addon for arrow manipulation, leaving only locating instance entrance and ghost runs for utility. Well, and achievements. I do like achievements...

So yeah, overall, the format of the guide addon isn't what I'd recommend for an addon guide to instances. There's some limited utility there, but at the very least for mobs and bosses, I would just strongly recommend the utility of DBM/Mob Notes addons.

I could get behind personalized mob notes from the WoW-Pro community, although that kinda heads in the direction of what happened with Tour Guide, and I know that with the rush to get cata leveling guides done, coding something new would be an extremely non-priority.

Thanks for the feedback, like I said, now's the time for the design discussion!

If we decide that dungeons guides shouldn't use any code/frame from the WoWPro core addon, then I'll just make it standalone (or just move on to my other addon projects ). But going through again the dungeon guides here, I still think it fits (though not necessarily within the subdivisions I thought at first?). But I think we'll only be sure once I make a simple, working alpha version with a couple of guides as example.

Overall, we should be careful to say such and such thing is too easy now or too streamlined to not warrant a guide, in "paper" or ingame. One could argue that the same could be said about leveling in Northrend and, yet, lots of people use the WoWPro Leveling addon and/or other addons. About dungeons, people have written guides in Northrend dungeons, even though they're shorter and more direct, including their quests lists.

For bosses... I disagree, I think there's a lot of room to cover bosses quickly with a few notes. What do you do when you go to a dungeon and one or more of the other players in the group haven't run the dungeon yet? Do you tell them to open a browser and read a full boss fight description on wowwiki or just give short notes about the fight? It's not like they are raid bosses, with 10 minutes fights and several phases. Plus, I don't think it's the same nor it should be as DBM, which is awesome, but more useful when you already know or expect the encounter mechanics.

Your idea of integrating notes into mobs/bosses tooltips is interesting and rather easy to implement. I could write an addon similar to Mob Notes in the future, tailored for WoWPro guides.

I don't really mind seeing addon form of a guide, and do think there's still that utility in regards to some of the other features, it's just that I'm still a bit hesitant about just how well information can be presented with the guide frame in regards to bosses/trash, enough that it's sufficient without being overly wordy/space consuming but still informative enough.

How much do you describe of what the ability does, and how much do you simply describe what a player should do?

When I explain a fight to someone new to an instance I know well, I do tailor comments to them, which this addon could be useful to in regards to class and role/spec. But what if you wipe and it's because of a certain mechanic? You'd certainly want to explain it in more detail.

Actually, in regards to that, it would be kind of cool if for the player communication part of the addon:
1) It first just whispers to other party members concise/basic tips to people based on their class/role.
2) When a player dies, addon logs last five spells/abilities to do damage to player. After boss dies, it gives you option of sending player an expanded note/tips specific to the abilities that killed them. If the party wipes, the notes go into party chat instead of whisper.

This limits the amount of info dump to just relevant stuff.. If they're doing fine with the concise notes, excellent, but if you wipe, you have the expanded notes for then.

It's funny, for a while we were talking about making a project on this site to supply short macros that describe boss abilities, for people to use when there were newbies in the group That's sort of what I see the boss part of the guide being. Also pleeeeeease make them printable to party chat! It would be epic!

I don't know, I get what you are saying, but I definitely think there is still a place for this type of guide. Don't get stuck in thinking it would be the leveling addon with dungeon content squished into it. It can have it's own frames, it's own other stuff.

The addon has merit purely for the location of the instance and guiding you where to go once you are inside - step by step in game instructions on how to navigate some of the confusing instances is really handy, even with the simplifications Blizz is making.

The idea of this addon is NOT to be DBM. Good heavens, no. That's far beyond the scope of what we are attempting.

All we are trying to do is bring a "paper" guide into the game in an easy-to-read presentation, with perhaps additional features - I really like the mob notes idea for trash mobs, since their details are simple enough to fit in a tooltip.

What this guide IS, in terms of boss fights, is the stuff you'd read to the group before starting. You know, the stuff you usually have to alt+tab to find a quick summary of wtf the boss does. That's what our guide would do, right in game, in a method that could even be clicked into party chat! Or of course, read over vent. Silvann is adding a handy picture frame too, for anything that needs to be explained in an image.

Overall I think you're idea of what our addon could and/or should do in this case is narrower that it should be, and skewed a bit. But, the feedback was great and we have more ideas now, keep it coming!

Mapping will probably be possible in all new dungeons, if TomTom is updated to include them. Or we can make something of our own at some point. They DO have maps, so I don't see why this wouldn't work. And eventually ALL dungeons will have fancy-pants maps, according to Blizz.

It would be nice if the Walkthrough guide was a framework that referenced the other guides, with it's own steps chaining them together. Basically, it starts out with maybe a note about what classes to bring, then loads the location guide if it detects that the player hasn't visited the dungeon entrance yet (not sure you can know this, but maybe it can tell if the player is unable to queue for that dungeon due to not finding the entrance?). Once the user is in the dungeon, it proceeds to guide them - it could load the quest list when they encounter the quest NPCs, then load each specific boss list as they approach the boss in question. Perhaps there is an option for whether the user wants to attempt to do achievements as well, or maybe they should just be something you have to open up manually.

Well, just because there are Blizzard's dungeon maps, does not mean we'll be able to use it to set up waypoints and such. Right now, ingame, I can't use TomTom's functions to place a waypoint in the worldmap frame, when it's showing a dungeon map. But it may be possible, I'll take a look at it!

About the walkthrough being more like a linker, I wasn't exactly thinking about that, but it makes sense. Otherwise, you'd have redundant guides between the walkthrough one and the rest.

I think that's because the way TomTom functions, it places a dot on the world map regardless of what zone you are in. So places that aren't part of a continent... ie dungeon maps... can't have TomTom waypoints. BUT - it has a map with a marker for the player, it can have coordinates - coordinates are just measures of the different percentages of the map on either side of the player marker. If Cladhaire does indeed rework TomTom, as he is talking about doing, this will definitely be something I suggest to him. Or, it's something we can create ourselves - honestly I don't think it would be all that difficult to do.

Auto-load location guide when dead during dungeon run = win! Would need to override TomTom's corpse arrow though, and be able to switch back to the dungeon guide automatically when arriving. Also would need another "last guide" parameter since this would wipe it out and any auto-switching back to a leveling guide would be broken

Maybe instead of using last guide for this, you can have linked guides? In the same way that the leveling guide links guides together, only you can have several.

We can decide ahead of time the types of guides to accept. In the register-guide function for the main dungeon guide, you link these sub-guides. Then they are loaded on demand. If they don't exist, they just aren't loaded, and the guide continues as normal.

Just ideas

A note about quests: They should primarily be located inside dungeons now, so lists won't really be too important - I would guess maybe quest stuff should just be part of the general walkthrough.

Also I'm the only one who can see this, so no worries - it hasn't magically published itself again.

It wouldn't be the first time I mess with TomTom's arrow options, hehe.

Yeah, about the last guide thing, that's why I suggested on github that they should be improved, maybe just having a "last guide" variable for each module and/or a "lastmodule" variable in the core addon should do the trick.

About the linked guides, they are sort of already linked through the info I request in the WoWPro.Dungeons:RegisterGuide. In addition to the other parameters, there's the dungeon name and subtype guide. If they don't match the addon's previously created list, then they won't be considered for anything else.

The problem now is that I want to allow several guides of the same type and I'm still messing on how to do that more naturally.

About the autoload, from the beginning, I've had several possible ideas. From loading a guide when zoning into the dungeon to load a boss fight when mousing over the boss. But I'll provide an option for players to disable it.

Loading multiple guides of the same type - as in guides by multiple authors?

I am wanting us to move away from this with the addon - though if people feel otherwise we can of course change that. Anyway, I think having multiple guides of the same subject confuses the addon users - how do they know which to use? Are multiple guides necessary? Is one clearly better than the other? Are the differences completely trivial?

For the main release of the leveling guides, we will only have one guide for each zone. We might, however, release a package of alternative guides as a separate download, since our addon should allow that without any trouble. Basically if there's some way to continue this model with your module, that would be awesome. I'm not sure I've been very clear, so let me know if something is still confusing!

Rather than loading multiple guides, would it make more sense to use something similar to what is found in the leveling module? I was thinking along the lines of the |Rank| command. That way you can set what displays based on your groups experience or if you want to accomplish achievements. Athough, dungeon achievements might fair better they were part of the achievements module.

Yeah, and I agree! But the way I'm designing the dungeon/guide list (see the image I included), it's not as practical as the leveling module to allow more than one guide of the same time. But, I think you're right, if someone makes a guide with a good but different approach, I'll likely just create another guide type label for it.